Update 01.179.2 Minor - Beta Improvements

Summary
Hello, Engineers! Today’s patch is another minor release, bringing some more smaller improvements as the team continues work towards the next major release. This includes a significant fix for ship dampeners so now, ships with multiple types of thrusters will no longer slowly fall in planetary gravity. Additionally, we resolved an issue players were experiencing with ships not being affected by gravity at all which meant they would fly on planets as if they were in space.
Coming up in the next major update, we will have a new in-game server browser for you which has a ton of new features, search filters and performance improvements. Some notable features include the ability to connect to a server via an IP address and search for servers which are using your preferred settings and mods. The list of servers will also load much faster with the new browser.
But rest assured that lots of work is still going into optimizing the game’s performance and multiplayer with a number of stress tests taking place in the last week which have allowed our programmers to analyze and track down the causes of performance drops.

Lastly, next Monday we will be streaming at 7PM CEST on the Keen Community Network over on Twitch. Once again, we’ll be joined by Marek and the producer of Space Engineers, Petr Minarik, where among various topics, we will be discussing the future of the game and what the team here at KeenSWH has been up to.

Fixes
- Fixed grids slowly falling in gravity when their dampeners were on
- Fixed grids having wrong gravity and mass setting in some cases when they undocked from a voxel

Edit: A gravely needed update. Though I am not so sure if tire tracks is really what we need.

Click to expand...

I doubt it was just tire tracks, it looked like they were working on wheel physics in general. One of the things to note was how the vehicle seemed to handle on ice as opposed to dirt; they didn't show much, but it looked like the vehicle slipped more on ice.
We certainly don't NEED tire tracks, but they're awesome, and since they're working on wheels anyway, why not?

Also, side note, but I kinda hope they'll have different tracks for different things. It looked like they just have skidmarks right now, but it would be cool to have something like shallow tire grooves from driving straight, with deeper groves depending on the weight of your vehicle or how hard you land from an impact.

That teaser was awesome, if you look closely you'll see arrows showing sort sort of downward force being applied, aswell as other areas. The arrows were reacting different on the soil and ice, good to see them doing some much needed love on the wheels.

i'm hoping the new server browser shows how long a server has been up for.................not a nice feeling when you spent 5 or so hours building a station for it not to appear anymore........really not a nice feeling. :/

oh sweet dude tire tracks!
nice ....could mean wheels are getting some much needed love.....like no more needing a gyroscope locked in override so you can drive in a straight line...

So having looked at the teaser i'm going to throw in some early predictions/ analysis.

- obviously wheel performance is changing a great deal, making wheels more viable
- Those collision debug things appear that they are changing from the spherical hitbox to cylindrical, i assume this means wheels friction can be a lot more consistent, This should help with planetary traction.
- It does seem that different materials apply different amounts of friction, so ice is slippery (instead of always driving on greased ice as it is right now)
- This ones probably more speculation, but very much hope im correct: Judging by the "tire marks" or the trails, they have rewritten the wheels to work more like ackkerman steering! the fact that the rear wheels and front wheels travel in almost the same track and the radius looks like its more or less scalar from the inside of turn radius from the out indicates it. also that yellow line that appears early on in the video would appear to be a turn radii focal point.
- I hope to hell they fix hand brake and braking force for heavier vehicles

Still waiting on a bunch of needed blocks. like the half cover wall mirror, corner cover wall, slanted interior block, slanted conveyor, and slabs. and for god sake, someone make those vented windows thruster damage friendly, they were born for that

Still no fix (or acknowledgement) of battery and solars just not working right ??? two modes that they get stuck in
1) lets say solars able to produce 3.2MW, total grid taking 0.2MW, batteries discharge at 0.2MW and only charge at 2.8MW... its almost like battery charge rate = solar total - discharge - grid consumption.... when it should just be charge rate = solar total - discharge?
2) happens more offten than 1) ..... solars just output nothing... like 0. happens a lot ... so you just end up with batteries going flat .... intresting I've had a world with no sun rotation ... so the solar output is constant and never drops to 0... its kind of like theres some soloar output calculation (maybe when solars are built??) which gets overriden to 0 when the sun goes out of range ... and never recovers..

I've been trying to play a scarce resources playthrough (uranium is only on the alien planet) .... and had to resort to 'cheating' with SM to add a reactor and some uranium to charge up batteries (and then remove) just to get through it ...
They used to work ... please fix them ... I was going to buy ME,, but this seems like a really simple maths bug to fix on grid input / outputs for solars and batteries... and I refuse to give up any more money to keen till they can get to the point of fixing bugs and keeping them fixed (eg. better source control management)....

Like all great teasers, it thrills and confuses simultaneously.
It has to be about handling, because you simply can't do those kind of maneuvers in the game right now without the car either spinning out or flipping over (usually both). Tire tracks would just be a minor bonus.